A pouch container having a spout for drinking or pouring mounted onto an upper edge portion of a pouch which includes side gusset portions formed of a flexible sheet such as a synthetic resin film or the like, for example, is often manufactured as follows. Specifically, a pouch having upper edge portions not yet heat-sealed is pre-manufactured through a separate process, and a spout is inserted into the pouch such that a mounting portion of the spout is sandwiched between the open upper edge portions of the pouch, and, in this state, the upper edge portions of the pouch are sealed by heat-sealing, thereby mounting the spout onto the pouch.
Here, the operation of mounting a spout onto a pouch as described above is generally performed in steps by transporting the pouch intermittently to each operation site where the pouch is sequentially stopped for the operation at each operation site. Here, if a series of operations from insertion of the spout into the pouch to heat-sealing are performed at the same operation site, fixing of the spout to the pouch by heat-sealing, which requires a certain amount of time, must be performed after the insertion of the spout into the pouch. This disadvantageously inhibits a high-speed operation of mounting the spout onto the pouch.
Accordingly, rather than inserting the spout into the open upper edge portions of the pouch P and sealing whole of the upper edge portions by heat-sealing to mount the spout onto the pouch immediately after this insertion process, a center portion of a mounting portion IP of the spout S which is inserted into the upper edge portions UE of the pouch P is temporarily fixed to the upper edge portions UE of the pouch P by spot-sealing, and, with the pouch and the spout in that state, the pouch P is transported to the next operation site, where the upper edge portions as a whole are heat-sealed to thereby mount the spout onto the pouch P, as shown in FIG. 12. Here, in FIG. 12, the shaded portions correspond to the heat-sealed regions of the pouch P and reference codes PS indicate the spot-sealed portion.
Patent Document 1: JP 2004-255742 A
Patent Document 2: JP 2006-7630 A